cockpits

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rivalin
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cockpits

Post by rivalin »

Are cockpits still supported or in game at all? I was looking at an old thread and it gave the impression that the whole way cockpits work is a mess, there was some ridiculous criteria that had to be applied in modelling them, and lots of general confusion, someone even said they could be loaded directly as OBJ's. Has it basically been decided that VS is going to dump them or has it just been forgotten about, or is VS full of cockpits and I just havn't seen them?

Anyway I made a simple cockpit but I don't know if it's of any use.

Image


I think a few decent quality cockpits could really help to make the player feel more like they're flying a spaceship than a camera. Anyway, just a thought.
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Re: cockpits

Post by loki1950 »

The cockpits are all still there they where just turned off in the config file for 0.5 most of the current ones are kinda pathetic :( and don't really fit there intended ships.So have fun :wink:

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Re: cockpits

Post by chuck_starchaser »

The ridiculous criteria I think you're speaking of is that polygons had to be pre-sorted by depth?
That was a very old limitation of the engine that Klauss fixed and removed. No longer applicable.
That happened years ago.
But Hellcat did not know that the problem was fixed, and as recently as a few months ago was
still saying that polygons had to be sorted. He might still not know that that's fixed, for all I know.
So, go for it; I think Loki is right that the only reason they are not being used is that there aren't
any decent ones.
Well, there's another reason, I think: If you put instruments and displays, at the moment there is
no mechanism in the engine for mapping dynamic textures onto 3D geometry. This is a feature
that was to come with the port to Ogre3D, which never happened. But if you don't put displays and
instruments, and leave all such matters to the HUD, and only put frames and "things", then you're
safe.
I'd encourage you to make sure your UV unwraps are non-overlapping, as you'd definitely want to
eventually texture them for the CineMut shader. Cockpits without shadows would be a pity.
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Re: cockpits

Post by rivalin »

Thanks for the replies, sounds like it won't be as much of a hassle as I thought. Just to be clear though, cockpits are wanted right? Or am I just wasting my time? I'm not doing this for modding my own install, so if they won't go into the actual game then I'll get on with something else.

Also I'm still not entirely sure on things like how the cockpit should be oriented sized, scaled etc, and I'm guessing it's been so long since there were any new ones that there's no allowance made for them in unitconverter either. Does anyone actually have any directions on how to get them in game?


Anyway, made a new one, texture bake took four frickin hours :shock: (look at it full screen to get the full effect)

Image

Image
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Re: cockpits

Post by loki1950 »

BTW you might consider a new image hosting service i get quite an inappropriate window when i click for full size(some teenies webcam ) have you seen this thread might be handy to place the Hud elements http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... =20&t=8267

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Re: cockpits

Post by chuck_starchaser »

rivalin wrote:Thanks for the replies, sounds like it won't be as much of a hassle as I thought. Just to be clear though, cockpits are wanted right? Or am I just wasting my time? I'm not doing this for modding my own install, so if they won't go into the actual game then I'll get on with something else.
This I cannot answer positively, as my mod is PU, not VS. In PU, the plan is to go 100% 3D cockpits, and to get rid of all 2D cockpits; but we haven't started yet. What I would say, though, is that, to be worth the trouble, cockpits should be highly detailed. I was once working on a Hellcat V cockpit for WCU:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 823#p54823
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 049#p55049
Here's a Galaxy cockpit that Dual Joe was working on:
http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/2127 ... ontpq2.jpg

Also, for VS, you might want to consider getting rid of large surfaces obscuring the outside view. There's no support for rendering dynamic textures on geometry, as you'd need in order to make your displays show things. VS relies exclusively on the HUD overlay, so right now a cockpit is something rather useless, in any practical sense, that just blocks the view of the outside, --not to say it wouldn't look cool--; but I would try to minimize the coverage, otherwise players will just hit F1 a second time and go to cockpit-less view.
Also I'm still not entirely sure on things like how the cockpit should be oriented sized, scaled etc, and I'm guessing it's been so long since there were any new ones that there's no allowance made for them in unitconverter either. Does anyone actually have any directions on how to get them in game?
I second your question. I would think scale should be in 1 unit = 1 meter. That should *always* be the scale, for everything. But some people prefer to work without scales or grids and to use the scaling numbers in xmesh and units.csv, afterwards. I suppose the origin would be where the camera is; and I suppose the orientation would be positive z = forward; positive y = up.

Be sure to model the whole interior, including stuff behind you you cannot see, as, when you want to bake AO's and PRT's for dynamic shadows and ambient occlusion, stuff you cannot see may yet count, shadows-wise, specular occlusion-wise, and radiosity-wise.
One good thing about cockpits is they don't need LOD's ;-)
loki1950 wrote:BTW you might consider a new image hosting service i get quite an inappropriate window when i click for full size(some teenies webcam )
Damn! I don't get them. :)
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Re: cockpits

Post by pyramid »

You can find the wanted cockpits listing under http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/media ... s#Cockpits, though I think the list should be reworked to have the faction specific variants included that follow the same art style guidelines as for vessels.

There should be at least variants for (rlaan, humanity, aera) x (shuttle, fighter, bomber, corvette, carrier, capital).
Or even better, each ship in VS should have its own cockpit 8)
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Re: cockpits

Post by rivalin »

sorry about the hosting, it's just imagevenue, I think it's just the standard image host most people use :shock:

Chuck, obviously ultra detailed cockpits are the end aim, what I was going for here were just some nice generic simple cockpits to replace the ultra low poly basic old ones until someone has time to model all the different cockpits for all the different races, ship classes etc. I was just going for what most space sims with cockpits go for, i.e. some struts with the same hud that's used without a cockpit, i.e. not every readout mapped to a screen etc.

eg this

Image

Anyway. no big deal, given the fact that the guy who makes the decisions apparently hasn't said a thing in two months I'm not holding my breath on official feedback :).
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Re: cockpits

Post by chuck_starchaser »

rivalin wrote:Anyway. no big deal, given the fact that the guy who makes the decisions apparently hasn't said a thing in two months I'm not holding my breath on official feedback :).
I think you missed Pyramid's post :D
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Re: cockpits

Post by Fendorin »

sorry about the hosting, it's just imagevenue, I think it's just the standard image host most people use
Not Really is not so serious when i open your picture another windows open automaticly and is a porn ad
i think isn't the feeling you want provide on this forum

try "photobucket"
or "divshare"
for this time i never see any porn ad on this two website.

Anyway is could be very nice if you remake a detailled cockpit with plain texture is a very good job but honestly i don't know if it's could be implemented soon??
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Re: cockpits

Post by rivalin »

it's ok Chuck, I saw it :) , I was just under the impression that nothing could happen without JackS' approval, and as far as I could tell he hasn't posted for a while.

Fendorin; if it bothers people then I won't use it, but divshare has an Alexa pagerank of 2,500 while imagevenue is at 92 in the world, out of 80 million, and is the most commonly used image hoster for forums, so I didn't think I was doing anything out of the ordinary.
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Re: cockpits

Post by Fendorin »

yes nothing happen without JackS approuvement/comments

then the best way is poke him in PM or Propose a name for be a "ministery assistant" and we should vote !!! lol
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Re: cockpits

Post by charlieg »

That cockpit looks nice so far. I hope you stick at it, as these things need somebody to push the devs a bit usually and then it'll get well supported. (I'm sure they have plenty of half finished quasi contributions...)

With a few good cockpits, I'm sure somebody (safemode maybe?) will get motivated to work on better cockpit support - perhaps including the displays as textures. Without the cockpits, though, I doubt that will happen, so keep going! They will get used, I'm sure of it.
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rivalin
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Re: cockpits

Post by rivalin »

http://www.box.net/shared/osx0lta3v7

Here's one of the cockpits, and the modelling's done, but it needs integration, and as the unitconverter is still not user friendly enough for me to understand how to use it :D , I can't test whether the orientation/scaling etc is right. The cockpit's at 0 and should be facing the right direction, and has been tilted to the angle it's meant to be viewed from; the real trouble is scale.

Also the other models I've contributed seem to be smooth shaded and ugly in the game, I detailed why in the thread I posted in the help section, but apparently noone could be bothered to reply so I still hav't found a solution for exporting correct smoothing to OBJ using Wings/Blender etc. Anyway I don't know how the conversion process works, but the wings file in the folder I've posted has the correct smoothing (i.e. all hard edges) but won't export the smoothing correctly to OBJ. Anyway, if the cockpits are wanted I'm going to need some help.
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Re: cockpits

Post by loki1950 »

Got it rivalin I'll have a look see at what i can do with it :wink:

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Re: cockpits

Post by pyramid »

rivalin wrote:the unitconverter is still not user friendly enough for me to understand how to use it
You might have a look on the quick start guides in the UC manual.
UC will not do the full integration for cockpits as this is the first time since UC was born that we get a mesh, so I might have a look at it. It should at least be able to convert your mesh to bfxm including textures.
IN any case, improvement ideas (and how to make it more user friendly) are always welcome.
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Re: cockpits

Post by rivalin »

thanks for the responses; the UC stuff is partly OT but I thought I'd put it here.

1. The text "Configure nVidia's nvcompress command path as used from command line (nvcompress is sufficient if it resides in a directory of your system PATH variable)" > we don't all have computer science degrees so I havn't a clue what that means. :D

2. It says I don't need to compress the textures, but it doesn't say if I still need nvcompress installed anyway if I choose to simply use the input textures.

3. when I try to do the conversion I get the message "runtime error r6034 an application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly......) then mesher crashes with no explanation of why> it's a touch off putting.
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Re: cockpits

Post by rivalin »

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Re: cockpits

Post by pyramid »

Since it's OT, I have replied to the UC questions in the proper UnitConverter thread.

As for the cockpit integration, I've never done this, but shall investigate how this works.

*EDIT*
Well, it doesn't work. I tried substituting the light_cockpit.bfxm with the newly converted bfxm file, but the cockpit doesn't show, and I have no clue either about correct scaling, origin, orientation and there is only a pathetic wiki page on HowTo:Create Cockpit in Wings3d.

Ayep, time to start another crusade... 8)
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Re: cockpits

Post by loki1950 »

Well, it doesn't work. I tried substituting the light_cockpit.bfxm with the newly converted bfxm file, but the cockpit doesn't show, and I have no clue either about correct scaling, origin, orientation
Did you turn cockpits back on in the config file :?:

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Re: cockpits

Post by pyramid »

loki1950 wrote:Did you turn cockpits back on in the config file :?
Yeah. The thing is the original light_cockpit shows fine, just when I replace the bfxm with the converted one, it doesn't show and there is no error whatsoever, so my guess is the mesh is loaded fine but either positioning or scale are not correct.
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